Read Online Ghosts at Christmas by Darren W. Ritson - Free Book Online Page A

wondering where she could have got to, but then realised that there was no time to lose; if there were injured people in the car they would need medical assistance, and quickly.
    He ran as fast as he could towards the car and, as he approached it from the rear, he could see that there were two seriously injured people in the front seat. He dashed around the front to see if they were still alive but both were slumped forwards and obviously dead. He took hold of the man in the driving seat and sat him back to make sure that he was deceased. He then turned his attention to the woman in the passenger seat. As he lookedclosely at her, he was horrified to see that she was the very same woman who had just flagged him down from the roadside moments earlier.
    He then heard a faint cry coming from the back of the car and when he looked closer he saw a young baby under the debris. The baby had survived the crash.
    The ghost of the recently killed mother, it seems, was still looking after her child – even in death.
    This is not the first account of a ghost coming back from the dead to rescue somebody. A similar occurrence happened on the A1 motorway between Morpeth and Berwick-upon-Tweed when the ghost of a back-packer returned from beyond the grave to save the victim of a car crash, a crash that the ghost had inadvertently caused.
T HE C OWLED M ONK OF S T P ETER ’ S , H EREFORD
    On 23 December 1926 two policemen were on foot patrol near St Peter’s Church in Hereford when they both saw something that frightened them half to death. As they were strolling past the church gate they happened to glance inside towards the church door and see a ‘strange, hooded figure dressed in a black cloak’. He drifted silently past the iron railings on the outskirts of the church grounds and disappeared from view.
    The two policemen decided to investigate further, just in case it was a burglar, and ventured inside the church grounds. They soon caught sight of the hooded figure once more, but were horrified to then see it drift straight through some locked iron gates and float off towards the porch of the church. Before the two bobbies could react, the figure then floated straight through the locked doors of the church and disappeared from view altogether.
    The policemen’s account of the ghost of St Peter’s spread through Hereford quickly and it was not long before othersventured forth and relayed their own ghost stories; the policemen’s encounter was not the first time the hooded figure had been seen. The father of a former organist at the church admitted that he too, had seen the ghost. He had seen the black hooded figure on a few occasions and on one of those occasions it had floated through the same wooden door. He pointed out that it was always seen in late December too, as that was when he had his sightings of the phantom.
    Some folk came forward with ‘identities’ for the hooded spectre. Some said it was Walter de Lacy, who had fallen from the church tower back in the thirteenth century. Others suggested it may be the ghost of a monk who had allegedly been murdered at the altar. The organist’s father claimed to have seen the monk inside the church, again in December.
    After a while, the ghost story dissipated and the spectre was seen no more … until eight years later, when he made his appearance again. Several locals had claimed to see the figure around first light, when they were passing the church while on their way to work.
    This spate of new ghost sightings brought pandemonium to the town when hundreds of would-be ghost hunters arrived at the churchyard in an effort to see the hooded phantom. On one occasion 200 people turned up in the hope of seeing the ghost. The authorities decided that enough was enough and so, in aneffort to quell the unwanted attention, they declared that a joker had been caught in the act ‘faking the ghost’– it worked. The crowds stopped their vigils and life returned to normal in the village.